5.18.2011
Lanthanum 8.9
9
New England fog shrouds a founder’s promontory
in delicate gray-green quiet. Moist light,
kind to the eyes. Prospect Terrace : height
of land above forgetful traffic (lethal, desultory).
Benign stone Roger leans from his avant-canoe.
Lifts hopeful beneficent hand... mimes the blind
seer’s foresight (insight). What’s in the mind
of Providence this morning? What borne anew
out of this misty-rusty matière, downstream
from piney swamp to Delta confluence?
Sign of the seal of the human arch : immense
message parked in a rushing homing pigeon’s light-
beam coda. Government be upon his shoulder,
warbles a sere Nazir : the servant-gardener,
the burden-carrier, kindly Samaritan : where-
ever two or three are gathered together... &
where you must go, I shall go too... these
are substance of a dovecȏte-code. Now I hear
the mournful drone of the milk train coming ‒
where the delta mingles Memphis garbage-boys
& the low hum of harmony of things. Matrix
of all unacknowledged goodness... sweetness
deep down there, Gerard (by George). Just
is. Who finds a footnote (horseshoe, asterisk)
(Aaron’s budding divining rod) will frame the
nonsense of those mumbling lips’ menorah-
tree. A metamorphosis of monarchs’
flight... limestone river-tomb burst into flame.
5.18.11
5.17.2011
Lanthanum 8.8
8
Unseasonable cool of this Providence weather.
Relentless gray clouds riding like the sea
against Labrador cliffs (far north, remote). If
we could dive, like Jonah, through the quicksilver
substance ‒ this galactic dream-stuff (through
this curtain of mirrors)... if we could ponder
the formula, like a thirsty Maximus, deeper
& deeper, to the quintessence of truth... &
say it ‒ where the 32 and the 1 make a perfect
33... through the cloud-shimmer of bass chords,
high notes... the whole 88 ‒ then that primordial,
irreducible Whatness would be... the actual Subject
of the Poem (the regal Word, the living One).
& it would be a Someone in disguise ‒ Peter
on tour ‒ paisan, gardener, ever-loving father-
brooder... shady Melchizedek (his bread & wine).
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
It would be a version of yourself, a shadow
of you : the greater portion of the Great
Proportion ‒ snowy mantle of the ratio.
A you made perfect lovingkindness (how
I do not know). As when a loving father
turns back to his child with a radiant look
to help him along the fearsome path he took
himself, long ago... here it is ‒ the farther,
farthest, deepest gate, my son, my son... &
out of the cold limestone & the rocky tomb
you emerge, Lazarus, Jonah, JB ‒ home at
last amid garden air... the eyes of Magdalen.
5.17.11
5.16.2011
Lanthanum 8.7
7
i.m. Bernard Greenhouse
The dogwood’s white cascades, under cool gray skies
like a mantle of foam across the terraced branches
‒ a petal-waterfall, or flocks of small white doves
that drift (as if one thought) on the evening breeze.
This shapely tree gives the suggestion of a dome
or movement of a cello, or a sturdy Greenhouse
(wrapt about his Countess). Where the whispers
of the sounds are born ‒ in young leaves, at home
on high. Only the bright thread of a glissando
lathed on a painful knot ‒ low note, Ruby ‒
rubato now, legato. It is the law of to be
or not to be ‒ the covenant with sorrow, Micky...
Alessandro... Absalom (my son, my son).
The everlasting boy is rabid for the sceptre,
now ‒ the crown of righteousness, the scimitar
of justice (make it right!). Roland, his chanson
for Charlemagne. & who will wear the crown?
Jason’s chasing Ariadne through the labyrinth
forever... lust & revenge pile up the plinth
of a putrid catafalque. The doves are gone.
On an almond retina, their silent flight, into
gray twilight of a late-born spring. She is
your alloy of steel, bumpkin; your mosaic law
woven hidden in the wave... your Sheba-rescue.
Who is, was, always there. Like that tiny figure
(Rex Artus) threaded through the iconic mish-
mash of a tall window (Otranto). Yon wished-for,
once & future tolling surf (étoile Jeanne d’Arc).
5.16.11
Lanthanum 8.6
6
When Hobo finds himself in rehab (a kind of harbor,
built on hardy cross-braced beams of honeycomb-
light) he makes a marvelous recovery, some-
how : harbinger of things to come. His neighbor
in the adjoining cave (one Lazarus, a gardener
from Lazicum) has seen it all before
but every time he wonders all the more. He
taps a whisper through the wall ‒ Did you see her,
Hobo? She saw you. Who? Madeleine,
your steadfast friend. Came each day, to wait
& watch beside your bed. Maybe you’ll celebrate
Thanksgiving with her after all. Thanks, cave-man,
mumbles Hobo (to his wall of stone). I’m still
in fragile health, he thinks (132 ailments just
now under his belt) yet healed I am, trust
me. Am hale & whole... one life left to fulfill.
The hospital (St. Magdalene) was planted in a park
one sabbath-day, once long ago (the specific date
no one remembers). From his bed, the late
reprobate looks out the window, tracing the arc
of a swallow’s flight : a bird built for the sky,
he thinks, as I was shaped for the clay.
Soon enough it will be Memorial Day...
he sinks toward sleep again. Never to die,
never to die... he watches his mother whittle
a baby boat for little Frisbee the leprechaun, &
letter its name on the bow (Sophie). Someone
will find it, she says to him - someone very far...
5.16.11
5.15.2011
5
Imagine you hiked up a song-path, pilgrim
following the beeline of a pearl-gray lamb’s-
wool cloak. Your GPS (like an eye-in-palm)
her phantom form ‒ one of the seraphim.
Into a crystal cave ‒ mouth of stalagmites,
candlelit. Night beehive, star-dome ‒
underground. Where dreams come from,
and memory... a jumble of anthracite
riven with iron threads. & she leads you on
as if blindfolded, like a magnet ‒ & you hear
the rustle of an unknown stream, somewhere
out of your own past (far-seeing, unforeseen).
It is an everlasting realm, she whispers,
turning halfway round ‒ where you were
before you were. A crystallographer
might understand : this crypt of aquifers,
this sky beneath a tomb (of petrified wood)...
& then I saw the petroglyphs, the writing
on the wall. Just one stick figure, hovering
beneath one dented arch ‒ an O for head,
an M overhead ‒ sketched with a crayon
of scarlet fire (edged with maroon & plum).
What does this mean? I whispered. Thumb-
print of an almond stem, she murmured ‒ one
burnt bud about to flower. From the dark baobab
of joy ‒ under the streambed where we followed,
singing. Then I turned too ‒ beheld the cave-
mouth burst with light... muttering Rahab, Rabbi...
5.15.11
Lanthanum 8.4
4
This patchwork poem could never be the whole
for which it was the hoped-for, hopeless emblem
‒ yet the Gateway Arch, that lofty steel amalgam
planted one night in my sleep, is just a symbol
too. For something greater, yet less visible;
more actual & omnipresent; ungraspable
except by some unmerited mercy, unpredictable.
Your own lambent grail ‒ a beehive vestibule
(mindful, heartfelt). The proud, the cold
cannot approach that fiery source (so near,
so quiet, listening) ‒ their hearts not here,
not there. Close by... shading a foretold
epitaph ‒ tattooed onto that breathing cenotaph
(carved across th’embarkèd lid of an amber
mandorla-circumference). Melek or Malakh or
Molokha-Regent, Prince du Mille Lacs or Laughing-
Water-Duchess ‒ borne away (bear with me) on
a barge (near White Bear Lake, upper Mississippi).
Toward your own delta of displaced memory,
the ripple-texture of the stream (up, down)
& the ragged willow branch that plows, unfazed,
against the current (knots of driftwood, flotsam,
slipping past)... its creaky-curving arm
in a gentle bend over the riverbend. Dazed
by its flickering implications, the summer sunlight
in a radiant matrix, moving with the water...
Love’s little ensign-sepulchre or Frisbee-spider
scoots for shore. Ridgeline. Cahokia sunset.
5.15.11
5.12.2011
An Amateur Defense of Poetry
What follows has no footnotes, no scholarly apparatus. Just my own faulty memory and groundless, amateur speculations.
*
When did poets begin writing "defenses"? My guess is that Philip Sidney's was one of the first, in Elizabethan England, around 1600. The Renaissance (or post-Renaissance) was in full swing, the Reformation was underway, the Enlightenment would be arriving soon. The Middle Age of faith was giving way to the Modern Age of reason & science. Prose was splitting off from poetry. Prose leaned toward facts, practical utility, rational argument, scientific evidence and explanation. Poetry leaned toward Art & Beauty (in caps), toward the emotional life, the life of the spirit, toward everything that could not be quantified & examined with objective detachment. The "defensive" stance, signaled by essays like Sidney's, represented a reaction against new pressures brought to bear on the traditional role of the poet-as-seer, as bearer and enunciator of ancient & communal knowledge - an immediate kind of understanding, outside the frameworks of rational argument or scientific proof. & I would say the division, the polarization, between the rational & the poetic approaches came to a head, was crystallized, in the shift from the discursive rationalism of the Restoration poets, to the imaginative vision of the Romantics (epitomized & defended perhaps most stoutly by Coleridge & Blake, with some help from Wordsworth).
*
But why does any of this matter now? The Romantics were a long time ago. Modern and Postmodern thought found other & seemingly more relevant ways to challenge any simplistic versions of rationalism or scientific positivism. But perhaps that is the crux of the problem. Poets have relinquished the debate to philosophers, physicists, biologists, commentators, theologians... to everyone except themselves. A defense, then, would have to involve a re-assertion, a new expression, of the cultural-intellectual authority of poetry. & poets themselves are variegated into all sorts of distinct groupings based on style, or on poetic theory, or by specific ethnic-cultural-historical-linguistic identifications. Often it is claimed that there is no such thing as poetry, only poetries. An intellectual defense such as I am suggesting, then, sounds like a tall order.
*
There will be no "return to Romanticism." But there might possibly be a return to something more venerable than the Romantics : a sense of poetry as matrix of cultural understanding, as source of vision. It seems to me that there are ways to step tentatively in this direction, from various points on the circumference. So here I will toss around a few hunches in that regard.
*
We could start by thinking of poetry as a kind of living monument or textual distillation of a culture's language. This is not a popular notion in these times. The focus today is on the immediacy of vernacular engagement : people find odious the idea of poetry as a kind of textual crypt of language. Yet something in the back of the mind nags every real poet like a guilty conscience : the language we speak is objectively beautiful; thus poetry ought to build lasting containers, expressions, exemplifications, of that language. Poetry ought to seek both the exquisite & the necessary - the best verbal equivalents of both experience & thought.
But to accept that challenge is to be confronted with considerably difficult consequences : for it means that new (or perhaps old) thematic demands are applied to poets & poetry. The "beauty of language" is not just sound-music, not just elegant wit & ornamentation. There is also the profound dimension of meaning & thought - forsaking which, poetry has already relinquished any claim to cultural authority.
To meet these demands, however, poetry brings to bear some surprising strengths. Because a poem is a kind of playful, seemingly-purposeless end-in-itself, it is capable of modeling the ends of things : forms, shapes, distinct entities, in their particularity, their integrity, their wholeness : in their identity as ends. The integrity, the self-fulfillment of things is echoed, modeled, sanctioned by the harmonious, inherent integrity of poems. This is a specific kind of verbal modeling (Aristotle called it mimesis) which is peculiar to poetry.
*
For Blake & Coleridge, Wordsworth & Whitman, Keats & Dickinson & others, poems are the verbal distillation of human acts of imagination. Imagination is a specific faculty, a power of the human mind : essentially a power of invention & synthesis. The human power of invention is likened (especially by Coleridge) to a supernatural creative Power (the origin of reality itself, as a cosmic whole, in the divine "I Am"). The problem that these Romantics had with the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, et al.) was what seemed to them a split between mind & heart, mind & soul, mind & spirit - between the reasoning, analyzing, abstracting mind, & the inspired imagination - its "sacred" representations of the whole of life, of life as wholeness.
The modern development of free-standing scientific rationalism, as the centerpiece of human thought, meant the inevitable sidelining of the imagination, and hence of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet. These are, of course, far from new ideas! But I think they represent the fundamental cause for the essentially ornamental & trivial social status of poetry in the contemporary world. It is, in sum, a question of two things : 1) the growing alienation of poets themselves from a sense of poetry as a distillation of the best (most memorable) language of their culture; and 2) the historical shift from imaginative (verbal) modeling of truth, to its rational analysis & (mathematical) verifications.
*
Is it possible today to counter these two trends - to rebuild, in a new mode, some of the intellectual confidence of, say, a Blake or a Coleridge? Many poets, in very distinct ways, have certainly made the effort. My own sense is that there is no method, no workable approach built on rational discourse or stubborn will-power. I think back, rather, to Wallace Stevens' notion, expressed in many of his poems & prose "adagia", that individual written poems are merely traces of something larger, more pervasive - some "poetry" inherent in the marrow of life itself. Poetry is thus some mysterious yet basic aspect of "nature" or of the human, which comes to the fore by its own power - the faculty of imagination somewhat in Coleridge's sense. The human mind synthesizes experience - its ultimate or "authorized" expression - not in discursive prose tracts nor in mathematical formulae - but in poetic invention, the insight of the human imagination, the vision of the whole, the All (though of course poetry - being pervasive - is also visible, lurking, active, in prose & science & mathematics too).
*
& I predict that as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists & scientists persist in digging through the deep layers of human origins and the history of the planet, they will discover more & more evidence of the imaginative leaps of the human mind, which have emerged even in prehistory, to visualize & foresee amazing, "incredible" phenomena of the future (the vast, galactic, cosmic future), which we today find difficult to conceive or conceptualize.
*
When did poets begin writing "defenses"? My guess is that Philip Sidney's was one of the first, in Elizabethan England, around 1600. The Renaissance (or post-Renaissance) was in full swing, the Reformation was underway, the Enlightenment would be arriving soon. The Middle Age of faith was giving way to the Modern Age of reason & science. Prose was splitting off from poetry. Prose leaned toward facts, practical utility, rational argument, scientific evidence and explanation. Poetry leaned toward Art & Beauty (in caps), toward the emotional life, the life of the spirit, toward everything that could not be quantified & examined with objective detachment. The "defensive" stance, signaled by essays like Sidney's, represented a reaction against new pressures brought to bear on the traditional role of the poet-as-seer, as bearer and enunciator of ancient & communal knowledge - an immediate kind of understanding, outside the frameworks of rational argument or scientific proof. & I would say the division, the polarization, between the rational & the poetic approaches came to a head, was crystallized, in the shift from the discursive rationalism of the Restoration poets, to the imaginative vision of the Romantics (epitomized & defended perhaps most stoutly by Coleridge & Blake, with some help from Wordsworth).
*
But why does any of this matter now? The Romantics were a long time ago. Modern and Postmodern thought found other & seemingly more relevant ways to challenge any simplistic versions of rationalism or scientific positivism. But perhaps that is the crux of the problem. Poets have relinquished the debate to philosophers, physicists, biologists, commentators, theologians... to everyone except themselves. A defense, then, would have to involve a re-assertion, a new expression, of the cultural-intellectual authority of poetry. & poets themselves are variegated into all sorts of distinct groupings based on style, or on poetic theory, or by specific ethnic-cultural-historical-linguistic identifications. Often it is claimed that there is no such thing as poetry, only poetries. An intellectual defense such as I am suggesting, then, sounds like a tall order.
*
There will be no "return to Romanticism." But there might possibly be a return to something more venerable than the Romantics : a sense of poetry as matrix of cultural understanding, as source of vision. It seems to me that there are ways to step tentatively in this direction, from various points on the circumference. So here I will toss around a few hunches in that regard.
*
We could start by thinking of poetry as a kind of living monument or textual distillation of a culture's language. This is not a popular notion in these times. The focus today is on the immediacy of vernacular engagement : people find odious the idea of poetry as a kind of textual crypt of language. Yet something in the back of the mind nags every real poet like a guilty conscience : the language we speak is objectively beautiful; thus poetry ought to build lasting containers, expressions, exemplifications, of that language. Poetry ought to seek both the exquisite & the necessary - the best verbal equivalents of both experience & thought.
But to accept that challenge is to be confronted with considerably difficult consequences : for it means that new (or perhaps old) thematic demands are applied to poets & poetry. The "beauty of language" is not just sound-music, not just elegant wit & ornamentation. There is also the profound dimension of meaning & thought - forsaking which, poetry has already relinquished any claim to cultural authority.
To meet these demands, however, poetry brings to bear some surprising strengths. Because a poem is a kind of playful, seemingly-purposeless end-in-itself, it is capable of modeling the ends of things : forms, shapes, distinct entities, in their particularity, their integrity, their wholeness : in their identity as ends. The integrity, the self-fulfillment of things is echoed, modeled, sanctioned by the harmonious, inherent integrity of poems. This is a specific kind of verbal modeling (Aristotle called it mimesis) which is peculiar to poetry.
*
For Blake & Coleridge, Wordsworth & Whitman, Keats & Dickinson & others, poems are the verbal distillation of human acts of imagination. Imagination is a specific faculty, a power of the human mind : essentially a power of invention & synthesis. The human power of invention is likened (especially by Coleridge) to a supernatural creative Power (the origin of reality itself, as a cosmic whole, in the divine "I Am"). The problem that these Romantics had with the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, et al.) was what seemed to them a split between mind & heart, mind & soul, mind & spirit - between the reasoning, analyzing, abstracting mind, & the inspired imagination - its "sacred" representations of the whole of life, of life as wholeness.
The modern development of free-standing scientific rationalism, as the centerpiece of human thought, meant the inevitable sidelining of the imagination, and hence of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet. These are, of course, far from new ideas! But I think they represent the fundamental cause for the essentially ornamental & trivial social status of poetry in the contemporary world. It is, in sum, a question of two things : 1) the growing alienation of poets themselves from a sense of poetry as a distillation of the best (most memorable) language of their culture; and 2) the historical shift from imaginative (verbal) modeling of truth, to its rational analysis & (mathematical) verifications.
*
Is it possible today to counter these two trends - to rebuild, in a new mode, some of the intellectual confidence of, say, a Blake or a Coleridge? Many poets, in very distinct ways, have certainly made the effort. My own sense is that there is no method, no workable approach built on rational discourse or stubborn will-power. I think back, rather, to Wallace Stevens' notion, expressed in many of his poems & prose "adagia", that individual written poems are merely traces of something larger, more pervasive - some "poetry" inherent in the marrow of life itself. Poetry is thus some mysterious yet basic aspect of "nature" or of the human, which comes to the fore by its own power - the faculty of imagination somewhat in Coleridge's sense. The human mind synthesizes experience - its ultimate or "authorized" expression - not in discursive prose tracts nor in mathematical formulae - but in poetic invention, the insight of the human imagination, the vision of the whole, the All (though of course poetry - being pervasive - is also visible, lurking, active, in prose & science & mathematics too).
*
& I predict that as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists & scientists persist in digging through the deep layers of human origins and the history of the planet, they will discover more & more evidence of the imaginative leaps of the human mind, which have emerged even in prehistory, to visualize & foresee amazing, "incredible" phenomena of the future (the vast, galactic, cosmic future), which we today find difficult to conceive or conceptualize.
5.10.2011
Lanthanum 8.3
3
The frail ancient splintering dogwood over my head
(with its iron band-aid) leafs its white lightning now;
has been with me, swaying above me, bough on
bough. Steadfast curve, sky-rib’s brisk veer aft
toward homestead (victory at last). Unspoken
presence. Longing’s compass. My voice whispers
ash down from another tree (sea-green conifer) &
yet another (almond mandolin). Gray wind-token, or
memoir of memoirs. The song-turtle (its gypsy-dom)
dove deep. The turtle dove deep. Dove deep,
Jonah ‒ into the blind sea-night, where moon-pearls
keep, & gemstones shine like eyes, stars... dove
home, sang home. Its mark, its Orient (bull’s-eye).
Home in its shell at the center of the earth
(Jerusalem). Whose bending womb was berth,
Jerusalem : a-traveling home (nostalgic guy
in Babylon, who’s gal’s in Galilee). The creaking
murmur of this familiar tree ‒ my friend, my
pining amber (sap-glow in the cosmic dark). Why
seven years of waiting, Rachel? My heart breaking.
Why this menorah, shining fifty more long years?
To make an anthem for our wandering land.
Was it not we that wandered, Ruth? I’ll stand
beside you. So the song filled up with tears.
So the voice came from bottom of the sea
& height of sky; its sounding laughter
only echo of a secret smile (my daughter).
Eyelash semaphores dove, alight... look, see.
5.10.11
5.09.2011
Lanthanum 8.2
2
A baby half-moon (pale, spooked) winks up there
behind a wispy pane of clouds. Centered just
over the Mayday dogwood ‒ its phosphorus
petal-crosses branched in flaring armada-
wings, like Inca footbridges (through shady
Andes). Not the stringy spans themselves
but sign language (quipu for crossing over).
Toward that aerie, dove, darker than any
Crystal Cave, loftier than Milky Way;
through the posh, lost bole of a cosmic
cranium, abaft the train-hoot of a tragi-
comic orb (half-&-half confusion-whorl).
These are some of the advantages
of standing on earth. At confluence
of physicists, them calibrated dalliance
(haruspicatin’ on a livid prune). Plumbs
a mental multiplex, sans doubt. I wonder
if they vegetate too much? Unhealthy
habits ossify braincells, somebody
sermonized this morn (on the radio)
‒ and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re
on about, reports BBC. Hey folks! There’s
money in know-how! proclaims Spokes-
person Numero Tweetie ‒ pure air
for sale! Yet the moon is loaded with dust,
noted rotten prophet. Iz not for sale
yet. & we keep walking toward that hail
of atoms, Josh ‒ wh-why? Moon or Bust.
5.9.11
5.06.2011
Odd High Formalism
As the talking wheels of American Poetry World wring their hands over various issues (including hand-wringing), and gaze up at the unanswering blue sky crying "whither Poetry?" and such, I would like to outline, briefly, my prediction - not prescription, but prediction - for the general shape of the future, based on the general shape of the past. The past and future of American poetry lies with OHF, or Odd High Formalism.
Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no.
Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is constituted by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).
The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... Odd High Formalism.
What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And anarchic wiggle & hop seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry.
The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's of the moment, it's raw, it's real... these are the current values. Poetry wants to blend in with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its separation from prose.
Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's sui generis formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the Dream Songs... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of difficulty. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be very much harder to write than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to distinguish itself - by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a relief - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American Odd High Formalism will set the measures of the dance to come.
Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no.
Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is constituted by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).
The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... Odd High Formalism.
What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And anarchic wiggle & hop seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry.
The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's of the moment, it's raw, it's real... these are the current values. Poetry wants to blend in with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its separation from prose.
Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's sui generis formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the Dream Songs... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of difficulty. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be very much harder to write than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to distinguish itself - by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a relief - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American Odd High Formalism will set the measures of the dance to come.
4.15.2011
From the days of John...
From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. Pondering this passage from the Gospels (here, Matthew 11:12). Jesus is eulogizing John.
"From the days of John until now..." I understand this as making a distinction between two different time-periods, one being under the spiritual "authority" of John & all the prophets (since "John is Elijah who is to come"), and the other under the authority of the Son of Man (Jesus). Two distinct eras of the spirit of God. Now = where the person of Jesus is manifest.
"... & men of violence take it by force." This is a deep & resonant saying. Interpreted & misinterpreted again & again....
How do I read it today? Well, have been reading a fascinating old book (1940s) by Julian Morgenstern, The ark, the ephod and the "tent of meeting". Studying & speculating on the affinities between the ark, the Temple, and very ancient tribal war-gods and their symbols - their temples, their cult objects. The god of the clan & the tribe was above all a divine defender of the tribe : through prayer & supplication & magic & divination, the tribal priest-leader would call upon the god in the ark (or tent, or temple) to come to their aid in battle.
In other words, men projected their sense of actuality, of truth, of fate, onto their own symbol of divine authority & sanction. And these religious projections would in turn be ratified and codified by force, by shamanistic magic. Man's own alienated powers were projected onto their shared symbolic totems.
I don't see this as pure false consciousness & mystification : I see it as archaic humanity's efforts to grasp and control a bewildering and violent & chaotic & dangerous world. At the same time, I think it must be recognized as also a reflection of that violence - it is suffused with force. & I identify this dimension in part with what Jesus is pointing toward in this passage.
We are talking about very basic background or foundations of human civilization, I guess. And there are no hard & fast distinctions or divides - it's more like a moral/ethical continuum. What I mean is there is a gradual change from conceiving the divine solely in terms of power, force & violent control, and conceiving the divine in terms of mercy, mutual understanding, reason, compassion, kindness... peacemaking. & we can see this change emerging in the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments). Necessity is the mother of invention.... & when the Hebrews emerged from servitude in Egypt, it was the legal-political wisdom of Moses which adapted ancient forms of tribal worship, cult & divination toward the beginnings of a notion of the divine as universal moral law.
So when Jesus speaks of "from the days of John", and the "kingdom of God" formerly coming with violence, he is pointing, it seems to me, toward a basic, fundamental re-orientation : a recognition that in God there is no sanction for force & violence : that force & violence and arbitrary rule actually have nothing to do with those ethical strata & dimensions of life which are part of the "kingdom" (love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, peace, happiness, hope, joy...). "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God."
This dimension I see as the "underside" of authoritative religion... the Mary-Magdalen-at-the-Sepulchre side... the "poetry" side... & there are a lot of these themes running through my scribblings...
"From the days of John until now..." I understand this as making a distinction between two different time-periods, one being under the spiritual "authority" of John & all the prophets (since "John is Elijah who is to come"), and the other under the authority of the Son of Man (Jesus). Two distinct eras of the spirit of God. Now = where the person of Jesus is manifest.
"... & men of violence take it by force." This is a deep & resonant saying. Interpreted & misinterpreted again & again....
How do I read it today? Well, have been reading a fascinating old book (1940s) by Julian Morgenstern, The ark, the ephod and the "tent of meeting". Studying & speculating on the affinities between the ark, the Temple, and very ancient tribal war-gods and their symbols - their temples, their cult objects. The god of the clan & the tribe was above all a divine defender of the tribe : through prayer & supplication & magic & divination, the tribal priest-leader would call upon the god in the ark (or tent, or temple) to come to their aid in battle.
In other words, men projected their sense of actuality, of truth, of fate, onto their own symbol of divine authority & sanction. And these religious projections would in turn be ratified and codified by force, by shamanistic magic. Man's own alienated powers were projected onto their shared symbolic totems.
I don't see this as pure false consciousness & mystification : I see it as archaic humanity's efforts to grasp and control a bewildering and violent & chaotic & dangerous world. At the same time, I think it must be recognized as also a reflection of that violence - it is suffused with force. & I identify this dimension in part with what Jesus is pointing toward in this passage.
We are talking about very basic background or foundations of human civilization, I guess. And there are no hard & fast distinctions or divides - it's more like a moral/ethical continuum. What I mean is there is a gradual change from conceiving the divine solely in terms of power, force & violent control, and conceiving the divine in terms of mercy, mutual understanding, reason, compassion, kindness... peacemaking. & we can see this change emerging in the Decalogue (the 10 Commandments). Necessity is the mother of invention.... & when the Hebrews emerged from servitude in Egypt, it was the legal-political wisdom of Moses which adapted ancient forms of tribal worship, cult & divination toward the beginnings of a notion of the divine as universal moral law.
So when Jesus speaks of "from the days of John", and the "kingdom of God" formerly coming with violence, he is pointing, it seems to me, toward a basic, fundamental re-orientation : a recognition that in God there is no sanction for force & violence : that force & violence and arbitrary rule actually have nothing to do with those ethical strata & dimensions of life which are part of the "kingdom" (love, mercy, kindness, compassion, justice, peace, happiness, hope, joy...). "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God."
This dimension I see as the "underside" of authoritative religion... the Mary-Magdalen-at-the-Sepulchre side... the "poetry" side... & there are a lot of these themes running through my scribblings...
4.12.2011
Lanthanum 8.1
1
Just a few stray notes eddy from the 88
(swirl over amber cove). Deflected light
on limestone cliffs hovers aft that
dark matrix-maze (starry checkmate).
Just a century and a half ago (forty days
& nights) the war began. A falling-away
at first, blind predator & prey ‒ then
slow allowance... leaky Cherokee gaze
of stricken countenance. Unmanageable,
unbearable... bearing it. Still. What
indeed will maintain the Union? Recalcitrant
crossword (Coptic?). O pregnant, impregnable
Rock, where are you now? Spar of galactic
ages... under the drab, defunct gaze of those
cleft, cloven Brady photos. All us leftovers
(me, you). Who recollects us now, O manic
one (forsaken stuttering Everyman)? Who
startles Lazarus-corpse from his cold hearth?
Only a flash from blind amygdala (Martha-
moth). Only a grace-note, silent (blue).
When you go beneath the earth (next week, on
your ring-structured Jonah-dive). Your rainbow
coo-coo turtledovey neck-of-the-wooer’s
woodland flight (shady, shady). Lake
of the Woods, maybe. Your own Yuri Gargarin
yurodivy St. Vitus dance ‒ your sister-dove’s
twins’ birthday, Dad (Mary, Mary). Love’s
homing pigeon’s aching back again (like a sign).
4.12.11
4.09.2011
3.29.2011
Pushkin & us (U.S.)
Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience. - Wallace Stevens
Have been reading interesting book on Pushkin and other Russian poets of his generation (The esoteric tradition in Russian Romantic literature, by Lauren Leighton).
Leighton explores the background in Freemasonry which, for the poets, included some knowledge & application of numerology, "cabalistics", and other esoteric codes in their poetry. She quotes Pushkin : "How fun it is to guide one's lines / with ciphers precisely row by row." & she investigates the incredibly sophisticated numerical design in Pushkin's gambling story, "The Queen of Spades". (Anna Akhmatova : "how complex, The Queen of Spades. Layer upon layer.")
But the numbers games of Pushkin and fellow poets (such as Bestuzhev, .a.k.a. "Marlinsky") were motivated not only by aesthetic "fun", but by a need for secrecy. In the early 19th century, revolution was in the air - Romantic poets (inspired by French & American models) expressed heroic aspirations for liberty, democracy, the end of autocracy.... & naturally, came up against the Czar & the secret police (cf. the Decembrist revolt, on which Leighton elaborates).
In fact, what strikes me, reading this study, is how (apparently) seamlessly knit-together were aesthetics and civics in the vocation of poet - in the poet's self- and public image. Poets were (re-)tellers of popular tales, romantic novelists, vox populi, "public intellectuals." They were also tangled up in webs of intrigue and complicity with the Czarist government, and the small (& murky) world of elite aristocracy. The oppressive might of a centralized, unaccountable government, in dialectical fashion, clarified the moral position of the liberal intelligentsia : & this continued even into the 20th century (see Mandelstam's remark - in one of his essays(?) - confirming his "sacred vow to the Fourth Estate").
I started thinking in a vague way, walking to work this morning, just how much this world of poets & literature differs from our own. Here, today, in the U.S., we tend to take political liberty for granted : the temptation is not so much in the direction of conspiracy or extremism, as toward a complacent kind of factionalism. The basic principles of government are not in question; instead, the debates are over how to apply them, and on what ethical-pragmatic-political grounds. We do not have so much a "liberal intelligentsia" as a political class, divided by party affiliation & allegiance to contrasting ideals. We have a nation polarized by partisanship, more interested in one-upping the opposition than in finding common ground. We have professional political careers maintained primarily by lobbyists & the media. Meanwhile, in poetry world, we have a sort of institutionalized "poetry class", dedicated to the idea of differentiating "poetry" as a special kind of substance and activity which requires special treatment, and distinct professional-academic institutions for its support. What is involved is a sort of abdication of the role of "poet" as free intellectual, of the poet as engaged writer.
I don't mean to assert this in order to cry "j'accuse" : I'm just as implicated in this abdication as anyone else - perhaps more so. I'm just trying to understand it. We hear the seasonal calls for more political engagement from poets and poetry : poetry should be more clear, more sincere, more virtuous, more popular. Meanwhile, in counterpoint, we have the seasonal & generational developments of special techniques & styles by means of which poetry is supposedly enabled to promote a more enlightened politics (cf., in their various ways, Language Poetry, the Cambridge School, Flarf, Conceptual Poetry...) .
Somehow I find something basic missing from both these wings of the poetry scene. Poetry is only hobbled by a dependence on either institutions or technique. Both of these approaches reduce poetry to a craft, a career, or a cabal. I tend, rather, to conceive of poetry as a gift and a spirit. The free-standing autonomy of the process of making art (& poems) is allied with imagination, a profoundly synthetic faculty of human intelligence. Yet this constellation of forces is not driven or motivated toward more autonomy (ie., indifference), but in the other direction : toward deeper participation. Here art is allied with science as free intellectual activity : and it's this essential freedom which allows art & poetry to bridge partisan divides, to question & evaluate political slogans & vested interests, to find common ground (often ironic) between supposedly bitter ideological opponents.
The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition. We have to get beyond the knee-jerk experimentalism of the nouveau-nouveau (which is profoundly shallow & uninformed), as well as from the marketable brands of traditionalism which reduce poetry to a set of learnable skills. Poetry is a gift & a calling toward engagement. Craft is inseparable from intellect & worldview, as larger, holistic dimensions. On this basis, the dignity of poetry is something sustained by the inner, moral discipline of individual poets (integrity : Stevens' "conscience"), and granted by society at large : it is not an attribute of professional networking or social cliques.
Have been reading interesting book on Pushkin and other Russian poets of his generation (The esoteric tradition in Russian Romantic literature, by Lauren Leighton).
Leighton explores the background in Freemasonry which, for the poets, included some knowledge & application of numerology, "cabalistics", and other esoteric codes in their poetry. She quotes Pushkin : "How fun it is to guide one's lines / with ciphers precisely row by row." & she investigates the incredibly sophisticated numerical design in Pushkin's gambling story, "The Queen of Spades". (Anna Akhmatova : "how complex, The Queen of Spades. Layer upon layer.")
But the numbers games of Pushkin and fellow poets (such as Bestuzhev, .a.k.a. "Marlinsky") were motivated not only by aesthetic "fun", but by a need for secrecy. In the early 19th century, revolution was in the air - Romantic poets (inspired by French & American models) expressed heroic aspirations for liberty, democracy, the end of autocracy.... & naturally, came up against the Czar & the secret police (cf. the Decembrist revolt, on which Leighton elaborates).
In fact, what strikes me, reading this study, is how (apparently) seamlessly knit-together were aesthetics and civics in the vocation of poet - in the poet's self- and public image. Poets were (re-)tellers of popular tales, romantic novelists, vox populi, "public intellectuals." They were also tangled up in webs of intrigue and complicity with the Czarist government, and the small (& murky) world of elite aristocracy. The oppressive might of a centralized, unaccountable government, in dialectical fashion, clarified the moral position of the liberal intelligentsia : & this continued even into the 20th century (see Mandelstam's remark - in one of his essays(?) - confirming his "sacred vow to the Fourth Estate").
I started thinking in a vague way, walking to work this morning, just how much this world of poets & literature differs from our own. Here, today, in the U.S., we tend to take political liberty for granted : the temptation is not so much in the direction of conspiracy or extremism, as toward a complacent kind of factionalism. The basic principles of government are not in question; instead, the debates are over how to apply them, and on what ethical-pragmatic-political grounds. We do not have so much a "liberal intelligentsia" as a political class, divided by party affiliation & allegiance to contrasting ideals. We have a nation polarized by partisanship, more interested in one-upping the opposition than in finding common ground. We have professional political careers maintained primarily by lobbyists & the media. Meanwhile, in poetry world, we have a sort of institutionalized "poetry class", dedicated to the idea of differentiating "poetry" as a special kind of substance and activity which requires special treatment, and distinct professional-academic institutions for its support. What is involved is a sort of abdication of the role of "poet" as free intellectual, of the poet as engaged writer.
I don't mean to assert this in order to cry "j'accuse" : I'm just as implicated in this abdication as anyone else - perhaps more so. I'm just trying to understand it. We hear the seasonal calls for more political engagement from poets and poetry : poetry should be more clear, more sincere, more virtuous, more popular. Meanwhile, in counterpoint, we have the seasonal & generational developments of special techniques & styles by means of which poetry is supposedly enabled to promote a more enlightened politics (cf., in their various ways, Language Poetry, the Cambridge School, Flarf, Conceptual Poetry...) .
Somehow I find something basic missing from both these wings of the poetry scene. Poetry is only hobbled by a dependence on either institutions or technique. Both of these approaches reduce poetry to a craft, a career, or a cabal. I tend, rather, to conceive of poetry as a gift and a spirit. The free-standing autonomy of the process of making art (& poems) is allied with imagination, a profoundly synthetic faculty of human intelligence. Yet this constellation of forces is not driven or motivated toward more autonomy (ie., indifference), but in the other direction : toward deeper participation. Here art is allied with science as free intellectual activity : and it's this essential freedom which allows art & poetry to bridge partisan divides, to question & evaluate political slogans & vested interests, to find common ground (often ironic) between supposedly bitter ideological opponents.
The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition. We have to get beyond the knee-jerk experimentalism of the nouveau-nouveau (which is profoundly shallow & uninformed), as well as from the marketable brands of traditionalism which reduce poetry to a set of learnable skills. Poetry is a gift & a calling toward engagement. Craft is inseparable from intellect & worldview, as larger, holistic dimensions. On this basis, the dignity of poetry is something sustained by the inner, moral discipline of individual poets (integrity : Stevens' "conscience"), and granted by society at large : it is not an attribute of professional networking or social cliques.
3.26.2011
Ars Poetica
I'm making these serial Youtube videos, reading my long poem... but I suppose I'm the very opposite of a performance artist. With a contemporary performance artist, or spoken word poet, or such, the PERFORMANCE - the video, the scene, the show - is ALL : the text is merely a script. With me, on the other hand, you have (on film) only the ghost of a text. You have to READ the poem (slowly, carefully) in order to get it. To "get" it.
Does this mean I align myself with postmodern textual obsessions, "language" games? Is the presence of the author, the speaker, displaced or disembodied or rendered ambivalent etc. by the controlling "text"? No. Rather, the text is a test, a trial, a labyrinth, by way of which everything is directed toward living, breathing, PRESENCE. It's not dissembling, it's not hermetic - it's personal. It's hide & seek. I write for readers.
Does this mean I align myself with postmodern textual obsessions, "language" games? Is the presence of the author, the speaker, displaced or disembodied or rendered ambivalent etc. by the controlling "text"? No. Rather, the text is a test, a trial, a labyrinth, by way of which everything is directed toward living, breathing, PRESENCE. It's not dissembling, it's not hermetic - it's personal. It's hide & seek. I write for readers.
Lanthanum 7.24
24
to John D. & Mary Ravlin Gould
As every poem is a summer sum
& every sketch a project of relations ‒
two points, united by a thread (conjunctions
of silver spider-light)... so that dove-hum
in the willow tree ‒ two mourning doves ‒
is one. Tomorrow is their 60th
(is it a diamond?) anniversary ‒ skittish
Hobo’s steadfast Mom & Dad, that is :
like one limestone outcrop in the Mississippi
whose bionic hieroglyph of layered streams
lifts up an evening stillness through time’s
wrack & roar. & tomorrow will be
another promise too, somewhere ‒ such
gracefulness engaging gravity ‒ when
limestone, sunlight, mark their honeymoon
together (near St. Anthony Falls). Watch,
then, Hobo : these unions are your own.
As every moonlit strand of Ariadne
threads through blind night its charted
labyrinth (a golden coign), so Blackstone’s
lightweight coracle is welded by an arc
of molten fire : & as the monarch wanders
point-to-point, unerring, to the high cedars
of his Lebanon (in Mexico), so the little spark
of her firefly-love will wind galactic splendor
on a spindle (at the hearth of life). So light
the leafy sprinkle from its ash-tree script...
so strong the bond of almond-eyed mandorla
(birchbark-swift). Where every sepulchre
is resurrection, & every heart immures
its grail... there, in a shady arbor in
St. Louis... or Bukovina. Near where you are.
3.26.11
3.23.2011
Lanthan 7.23
23
& so Blackstone fell fast asleep, & dreamed
of Maximus, the Enunciator ‒ hived away
in his steep prison cell, by an azure sea.
Ninefold-more-monkish monk (esteemed
by Empress Theodora for his mellifluous
mind, his clarity ‒ his charity). It was
the articulation of a honeycomb ‒ those
bees of Queen Bea (Regina Magnanimous
in amber trireme, milky dome) made it.
All in one Netherlandish night. Curviform
like windblown home or prairie ship ‒ borne
on nine wings out of a cove (by candlelight).
& the magnetic force, the gravitational pull
of the ballast (hidden below decks, below
the water line). The centripetal prow
of that golden nine-sense, dodecagonal ‒
encrypted, engraved (with royal warning).
It was the enveloping sea, the shadow
of the Argo’s grave. It was she, of the
crow (Civitas Regis Regum Omnium) thing ‒
of the seal, of the talisman. The ravens’
meal. When the sea raved, & the sky
raged, & Jonah, shivering, readied to die...
then blackbirds flew, & a cave-voice bent
Elijah’s ear down low (where servants go).
Down to the sepulchre (its empty cup)
whence that voice (like a lotus) rises up :
gray omnipresent eminence. Fire-halo.
3.22.11
& so Blackstone fell fast asleep, & dreamed
of Maximus, the Enunciator ‒ hived away
in his steep prison cell, by an azure sea.
Ninefold-more-monkish monk (esteemed
by Empress Theodora for his mellifluous
mind, his clarity ‒ his charity). It was
the articulation of a honeycomb ‒ those
bees of Queen Bea (Regina Magnanimous
in amber trireme, milky dome) made it.
All in one Netherlandish night. Curviform
like windblown home or prairie ship ‒ borne
on nine wings out of a cove (by candlelight).
& the magnetic force, the gravitational pull
of the ballast (hidden below decks, below
the water line). The centripetal prow
of that golden nine-sense, dodecagonal ‒
encrypted, engraved (with royal warning).
It was the enveloping sea, the shadow
of the Argo’s grave. It was she, of the
crow (Civitas Regis Regum Omnium) thing ‒
of the seal, of the talisman. The ravens’
meal. When the sea raved, & the sky
raged, & Jonah, shivering, readied to die...
then blackbirds flew, & a cave-voice bent
Elijah’s ear down low (where servants go).
Down to the sepulchre (its empty cup)
whence that voice (like a lotus) rises up :
gray omnipresent eminence. Fire-halo.
3.22.11
3.21.2011
Lanthanum 7.22
22
On the eve of the vernal equinox this year
the moon drew extra-near, a super-moon. We
watched it rise over the East Side ridge, gone
round ‒ heavy cream-&-honey disk, the color
of limestone. Behind the State House dome
downtown, where we were standing ‒ by the
Masonic Temple, under the Independent Man
(Roger W.) ‒ by Veteran’s Auditorium,
where we were going. For the 11th symphony
(a veteran’s number) by that shady veteran
of Stalin’s reign (not-false Dmitri) : ironic paean
to the veterans of Kremlin Square (1905, & every
year after). One cyclone-harmonic blast (intense,
excruciating). With an octave for turtledove
in-woven like pain ‒ minor keystone of
its void (of agony). Until the last bell sounds
(at last). It must be heard to be believed.
& so the moon drew near, as spring drew nigh
as once a clay chamber became a ball of sky.
As if a shadow (under pyramids) conceived ‒
as if an image of the sun were set on earth
proportionate to recessed light. The greater
with the lesser light ‒ the joy (grief, later)
of the antiphon (of black & white). Rebirth
from death. The choir sings from its honeycomb,
its fugue, its counterpoint ‒ its pain, its counter-
pane. From depths of milkweed camouflage, where
monarchs reign (a seedy Lebanon, beyond all doom).
3.21.11
On the eve of the vernal equinox this year
the moon drew extra-near, a super-moon. We
watched it rise over the East Side ridge, gone
round ‒ heavy cream-&-honey disk, the color
of limestone. Behind the State House dome
downtown, where we were standing ‒ by the
Masonic Temple, under the Independent Man
(Roger W.) ‒ by Veteran’s Auditorium,
where we were going. For the 11th symphony
(a veteran’s number) by that shady veteran
of Stalin’s reign (not-false Dmitri) : ironic paean
to the veterans of Kremlin Square (1905, & every
year after). One cyclone-harmonic blast (intense,
excruciating). With an octave for turtledove
in-woven like pain ‒ minor keystone of
its void (of agony). Until the last bell sounds
(at last). It must be heard to be believed.
& so the moon drew near, as spring drew nigh
as once a clay chamber became a ball of sky.
As if a shadow (under pyramids) conceived ‒
as if an image of the sun were set on earth
proportionate to recessed light. The greater
with the lesser light ‒ the joy (grief, later)
of the antiphon (of black & white). Rebirth
from death. The choir sings from its honeycomb,
its fugue, its counterpoint ‒ its pain, its counter-
pane. From depths of milkweed camouflage, where
monarchs reign (a seedy Lebanon, beyond all doom).
3.21.11
3.18.2011
Lanthanum 7.21
21
A hint of iron spring in the backbone, like
that crook in Rififi, holding up the safe.
I am coming like a thief. Enough
will be just enough, murmurs Melchizedek.
Here’s the combo, my sweet pale
omen, my Peg in a square poulet, my
palomino. Tonight’s do or die. Pourquoi?
‒ Sez that beak of a coarse cousin, mal-
adroit (sans cinema) Corsican ‒ be
cuz. Bees cause your gemstone-blaze
(in the pink), like a happy hearth-maze
(quattro sorelli) horsing a roundelay
under a lampshade (d’accord). You’re
sweet, villain. For now. Comme tu veux.
You’ve got visitors (in the make-up room,
ma chère). So... your trip... les jeux
sont faits. What’s happenin? The key’s
in your hand, mon idiot, mon frère
(Percy?). They looks like brother & ‒
brr! ‒ oak (some hood!). C’est ma jeune fille.
Gotta practice my style o’harmonique, Sal
(this way, spaghetto). Fleurs, masques...
C’est fini. Les jeux... ‒ the ice ‒ fast!
I forgot his number... so revoir, Mel. So
long, the whole rotten bunch of you!
L’Age d’Or’s closed, for now. Here come
that black-eyed Irish clover, strummin’ her
baobab banjo. Let the bad guys go (for now).
3.17.11
3.16.2011
Lanthanum 7.20
20
& that Henry... who was he, again?
His shoulders ached with balancing mistakes,
with stumbling around bumping into things without
looking. On his creaky Percy-fool wagon-
agate, his waning Charlie-horse... it will take
some amount of grace to set him ever straight!
Riding his windvane like a tied-on rooster, what
with a ladder of pushpins he spun & tore a door
of cork right through that lazy bull’s tin eye ‒
like a laser eye, Polly. Go lie aft, then,
mate, on your limestone bunk ‒ sigh your ashen
anthem, lonesome Lonnie, son. Why? Tell you why.
In the parallactic shade of the negative parable
you seize your shadow in the narrow mirror,
the dim back ward. & a beam from way black
yond reminds ye of what ye was capable, Abel &
Mabel, of shaping up to be. Back in the beguine.
By the birch tree scroll of river-life, the tree-
river aforetimes, even. The script was (whee!)
predictable, Zeke (wheels!) like them radiation-
spooks daubed in the cave-lobby, by the bone-
fire (near Narbonne, Guillaume). Crystalloid
lens by (drip, drop) eddy-curls (ridiculous in
celluloid). Long Curly lashes together a lone
Blackstone soul ‒ original sod-farm, Johnny ‒ her
yellow-sweet plum’s like Xanadu manna-dew by
sock-it-to-me stony crew. Meet me in St. Louie,
Suzy, Hughie... watch her glide on in. You’ll see.
3.16.11
3.14.2011
Lanthanum 7.19
19
to the people of Japan
This March day, dressed in grey. Hollow
melody of turtledove attends one raging
ocean of destructions. Tsunami (anguish).
Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia-flood seeps through
abandoned stony vaults. & the lovesick
poet’s flimsy heart, a frayed basket... &
that fever-priest (manic, homeless) who
sets himself on fire... brief candlestick of
guttering street flame, against what storm.
Baptized with water & with fire ‒ where is
the rock of our foundation? voices choir...
amid such sweeping desolation. Lips form
the oval of their finis prayer (O mournful
hoopoe). There : there is the rock. The
Word. Is logos = ratio = proportion : a
portion-crumb of tears (O human imago).
We are baptized into the foaming waters
of its delta-source, straight from the rock.
Its Nile-mosaic, its covenanting ark,
its promissory arc’s rain-shrouded eyrie-
air. Its bending ligament, its last &
lasting testament, its all-encompassing
agape-argument. Its gift, its offering...
its death. Which is the death of death
itself, a last full measure of its vanishing.
Its limit-point, its form. Its grave.
For each grave is the limit of the earth.
One wave, one teardrop (harbors everything).
3.14.11
3.12.2011
Lanthanum 7.18
18
Blackstone, a figure for the solitary soul
sketches a synopsis for a love story. A resume
of sorts (his own). His tricksy Ariadne goes away
& leaves him with a glittering thread ‒ raveled,
tangled in a woodchip. Leading... somewhere.
Through the blind maze. A scintillant &
coruscating lifeline, like the golden ring Crane’s
father would have tossed his bursting Hart ‒ there,
under the shadow of a Mexican volcano
(mammoth earth-mound; pyramid, or tomb).
Draws him to that pine-grove’s little room
cut into rock, where the monarchs go
(defying gravity) ‒ that milkweed, milk-train,
morning trail. Blackstone’s astigmatism-
vision scratches only stick figures, clunky-
spelunky glyphs, like prehistoric spaceman
icons. An orthogonal matrix, with sunny sphere
for Shakespeare-brain... and over this, an arc,
a lens (a curvature-canoe, a rainbow-ark).
His trademark gravemarker (Osiris-bier).
He loves to draw, & he would love to draw love
into his Ariadne-armillary (armadillo-track).
Where the glittering string straightens his back
into an upright L ‒ into its almond alcove (its
refining fire). Where desire is tempered
in the habitat of mercy ‒ its just attunement
on the octave of thanksgiving, gratitude... blent
spectrum of the iris of the eye (my Ariadne-bird).
3.12.11
3.10.2011
Proportion & harmony
Have been reading a lot about architecture lately. Might have something to do with the fact that ongoing poem Lanthanum emerged out of an architectural dream I had one night (about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis).
Especially Richard Padovan's great book, Proportion, and another book he translated, by the Dutch monk-architect Hans van der Laan (Architectonic Space).
Padovan bases his book on an interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's influential 1905 book on aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy. Very basically, the impulse of "empathy" projects the human into nature, and then models art and architecture on a reflection (an empathetic imitation) of Nature. Whereas the impulse to "abstraction" is more basic & "primitive" : humankind looks out at reality as a threatening chaos, immeasurable, and (abstract) art is a sort of escape/shelter - a means of controlling chaos through imposing order....
anyway, that's just how Padovan gets going, & organizes his review of geometry, proportion, architecture & philosophy in the West over the past 4000 yrs.... it's the opposite of the mystical-magical occult numerological "Golden Section" theorizing which has been popular...
(I'd be curious to know if Wallace Stevens read or was interested in Worringer's monograph. A lot of the modernist artists read it.)
Proportion is the key to form, whether in architecture or aesthetics generally. But do we draw proportion from nature, or impose our own orders? Padovan describes how van der Laan sets out the basic requirements for proportion (the smallest element in an ordered ratio with the whole, and with the other elements), and discovers the "plastic number" - a ratio of 1 : 1.325 (close to 3 : 4), which is proportional through a broad range of whole numbers, & thus handy for the kind of incremental design of basic structures... And this is tied in with van der Laan's very original philosophy of architecture (an "abstract" approach, in Worringer's terms) in which humankind imposes form & creates relational spaces, "homes", within the infinite & measureless continuum of natural space....
I'm finding all this very interesting, anyway, in relation to compositional & thematic aspects of poetry... & I am trying to connect it with other not-so-architectural dimensions of Lanthanum....
like the theological musings on the status or ontology of the human Person.... Maximus, & all that. A trinitarian, incarnational theology sets up a relational situation, a kind of family kinship or resemblance, between God & Man, Father/Son & Spirit.... so to make it possible to unite the notion of "Man is the measure of all things" ("I say unto you, the Son of Man is coming at the right hand of Power"... Jesus says somewhere) - but not in a disproportionate, arrogant stance : rather in proportion with the other Persons of the trinity.... the Image and the Substantial....
More later, maybe. There's a connection in all this with my Mandelstamian & Acmeist leanings. OM's "domestic hellenism" is about the Word as an architectonic that "humanizes" the earth, makes it fit to dwell in.... Gumilev's "chaste vision" is an embodied kind of sense of proportion & harmony....
*
- & having digested as best I can the great syntheses in Padovan's multidisciplinary work (Proportion) - science, philosophy, architecture - I find my response is a sense of mystery, a recognition of the limits of human knowledge.
The book itself is really built like a large structure, a cathedral... on the simple ground of an essential contrast : between 1) the empathetic/Platonic attitude - which finds its human reflection in the (numbered) order of Nature, & understands human intellect as a union (or reunion) with the order of nature - rooted in memory (the mind as a blank slate on which impressions appear); and 2) the abstract/Aristotelian stance, which recognizes a fundamental break between inside and outside, human and natural, & understands the intellect as inherently active, formative, creative : what we know is what we make. Padovan shows how these fundamental stances return as leitmotifs through Western history : so the development from Locke to Berkeley to Hume exhibits a sort of dead-end for both empiricism and idealism - until Kant reasserted the human mind itself as formative agent of nature, experience, reality...
Padovan returns & grounds these abstract heights of western thought to the most basic & primitive human activities (building, shelter), by connecting a notion of the human intellect as active, form-creating (out of Aristotle & Kant), with van der Laan's sense of architecture as the basic human building-impulse. We know what we make, and what we make is a separate living-space (by way of walls) within the infinite space of nature : and in doing so setting up a ratio or proportion between the measured & the immeasurable, the inside & the outside.
Again, though, what I come away with from this reading is a sense of mystery, of the limits of knowledge per se. Because I understand the fundamental contrast - between Plato & Aristotle, idealism & empiricism, number & irrational space - as irresolvable on a purely intellectual or epistemological or abstract level. For me, all this is Athens : there is another & greater binary or contrast at play : with Jerusalem. As I understand it, the dimension represented by "Jerusalem" is the Hebraic-Christian understanding of personal, subjective consciousness & existence as the very marrow of reality : life. We live in an irreducible, inalienable cosmos of Persons : and the true proportion which maintains all life (which "created" the cosmos) is based not on knowledge or mathematics, but on love. This is the mediating "song of the turtledove" which is heard in our land (Song of Songs, which is Solomon's - the figure of wisdom).
Thus we inhabit, yes, something architectonic - filled with "number, weight & measure" - but also something more than architectonic, more than abstract, more than is found in your philosophy, Horatio. We participate in a fundamentally dramatic occasion : life on earth, life in the universe. A life rooted in kinship with one another, with relationship, with persons : where the ultimate harmonies & proportions are transposed to the ethical sphere, to the dimensions of love, to the plummet of the human heart.
*
Hart Crane's The Bridge is suffused with, & structured by, something like this kind of "dream-architectonics." I think my daughter Phoebe's photo on the cover of Lanthanum (taken from a bridge over the Mississippi, a few blocks from my parent's house - both sides of the family have lived in this area for 3-4 generations) evokes this dream-sense too.
Especially Richard Padovan's great book, Proportion, and another book he translated, by the Dutch monk-architect Hans van der Laan (Architectonic Space).
Padovan bases his book on an interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's influential 1905 book on aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy. Very basically, the impulse of "empathy" projects the human into nature, and then models art and architecture on a reflection (an empathetic imitation) of Nature. Whereas the impulse to "abstraction" is more basic & "primitive" : humankind looks out at reality as a threatening chaos, immeasurable, and (abstract) art is a sort of escape/shelter - a means of controlling chaos through imposing order....
anyway, that's just how Padovan gets going, & organizes his review of geometry, proportion, architecture & philosophy in the West over the past 4000 yrs.... it's the opposite of the mystical-magical occult numerological "Golden Section" theorizing which has been popular...
(I'd be curious to know if Wallace Stevens read or was interested in Worringer's monograph. A lot of the modernist artists read it.)
Proportion is the key to form, whether in architecture or aesthetics generally. But do we draw proportion from nature, or impose our own orders? Padovan describes how van der Laan sets out the basic requirements for proportion (the smallest element in an ordered ratio with the whole, and with the other elements), and discovers the "plastic number" - a ratio of 1 : 1.325 (close to 3 : 4), which is proportional through a broad range of whole numbers, & thus handy for the kind of incremental design of basic structures... And this is tied in with van der Laan's very original philosophy of architecture (an "abstract" approach, in Worringer's terms) in which humankind imposes form & creates relational spaces, "homes", within the infinite & measureless continuum of natural space....
I'm finding all this very interesting, anyway, in relation to compositional & thematic aspects of poetry... & I am trying to connect it with other not-so-architectural dimensions of Lanthanum....
like the theological musings on the status or ontology of the human Person.... Maximus, & all that. A trinitarian, incarnational theology sets up a relational situation, a kind of family kinship or resemblance, between God & Man, Father/Son & Spirit.... so to make it possible to unite the notion of "Man is the measure of all things" ("I say unto you, the Son of Man is coming at the right hand of Power"... Jesus says somewhere) - but not in a disproportionate, arrogant stance : rather in proportion with the other Persons of the trinity.... the Image and the Substantial....
More later, maybe. There's a connection in all this with my Mandelstamian & Acmeist leanings. OM's "domestic hellenism" is about the Word as an architectonic that "humanizes" the earth, makes it fit to dwell in.... Gumilev's "chaste vision" is an embodied kind of sense of proportion & harmony....
*
- & having digested as best I can the great syntheses in Padovan's multidisciplinary work (Proportion) - science, philosophy, architecture - I find my response is a sense of mystery, a recognition of the limits of human knowledge.
The book itself is really built like a large structure, a cathedral... on the simple ground of an essential contrast : between 1) the empathetic/Platonic attitude - which finds its human reflection in the (numbered) order of Nature, & understands human intellect as a union (or reunion) with the order of nature - rooted in memory (the mind as a blank slate on which impressions appear); and 2) the abstract/Aristotelian stance, which recognizes a fundamental break between inside and outside, human and natural, & understands the intellect as inherently active, formative, creative : what we know is what we make. Padovan shows how these fundamental stances return as leitmotifs through Western history : so the development from Locke to Berkeley to Hume exhibits a sort of dead-end for both empiricism and idealism - until Kant reasserted the human mind itself as formative agent of nature, experience, reality...
Padovan returns & grounds these abstract heights of western thought to the most basic & primitive human activities (building, shelter), by connecting a notion of the human intellect as active, form-creating (out of Aristotle & Kant), with van der Laan's sense of architecture as the basic human building-impulse. We know what we make, and what we make is a separate living-space (by way of walls) within the infinite space of nature : and in doing so setting up a ratio or proportion between the measured & the immeasurable, the inside & the outside.
Again, though, what I come away with from this reading is a sense of mystery, of the limits of knowledge per se. Because I understand the fundamental contrast - between Plato & Aristotle, idealism & empiricism, number & irrational space - as irresolvable on a purely intellectual or epistemological or abstract level. For me, all this is Athens : there is another & greater binary or contrast at play : with Jerusalem. As I understand it, the dimension represented by "Jerusalem" is the Hebraic-Christian understanding of personal, subjective consciousness & existence as the very marrow of reality : life. We live in an irreducible, inalienable cosmos of Persons : and the true proportion which maintains all life (which "created" the cosmos) is based not on knowledge or mathematics, but on love. This is the mediating "song of the turtledove" which is heard in our land (Song of Songs, which is Solomon's - the figure of wisdom).
Thus we inhabit, yes, something architectonic - filled with "number, weight & measure" - but also something more than architectonic, more than abstract, more than is found in your philosophy, Horatio. We participate in a fundamentally dramatic occasion : life on earth, life in the universe. A life rooted in kinship with one another, with relationship, with persons : where the ultimate harmonies & proportions are transposed to the ethical sphere, to the dimensions of love, to the plummet of the human heart.
*
Hart Crane's The Bridge is suffused with, & structured by, something like this kind of "dream-architectonics." I think my daughter Phoebe's photo on the cover of Lanthanum (taken from a bridge over the Mississippi, a few blocks from my parent's house - both sides of the family have lived in this area for 3-4 generations) evokes this dream-sense too.
3.04.2011
2.25.2011
2.23.2011
Lanthanum 7.17
17
The old stone church, its simple commandments
Hobo left behind, has not left him behind ‒
under the chaste L of the lamb-lamp, its spine
of bone structure, marrow of the fundament...
of a law that makes a nesting-place for grace
amid kin, among strangers. Its arc follows him
into the wilderness of his lack-love, to limn
(in the abstract) its geometry, its resting-place ‒
like a map from the delta, returning to the delta
(Hobo’s pyramid of sighs). A sunlit eye,
submarine, filigreed with wavy festoons ‒ sky-
arch of acanthus, like a pattern of bear feet
leftover from the midnight pole (dancing
in a ring). Through curving lashes of palm-
leaves, & through the glinting rain-spectrum,
gleaming, shining... a human soul, glancing,
looks out ‒ like Promethean fire its light, its
smile... that will prevail. As through a translucent
babushka-doll (or wooden icon) wisdom’s acumen
twinkles through Hobo to Blackstone to ancient
hermit Maximus : who formulates (in chaste &
chastened syllable) a simple outline of the earth’s
foundation ‒ limestone sketch beside a lambent
surf’s salt curve. Where line & curve are one
like the dove that mantled & remained on Him
(as foam upon a wave’s bare crest) ‒ where kind
& personal are fused... where soul & grace depend
like the radius of a bowsprit’s arc (creation’s rim).
2.23.11
2.20.2011
My new watch is my old watch
I took a walk this afternoon, around the East Side (of Providence). Sunny & brisk outside. I was cogitating the next Lanthanum passage... thinking about time & memory & my own time & memories... about Proust & Augustine & Nabokov, & a phrase from Nicholas of Cusa : "Thus time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the measuring soul." & I was thinking about how this related to 1) Aristotle's approach to knowledge, his affirmation of the absolute, the primordial integrity (in an epistemological sense) of the reality of individual, distinct, unique living things... empiricism, I guess, of a sort... (I really don't know much about philosophy - dropped out of the one ph. course I signed up for in college). & I related this sense of the soul also to 2) the Judaeo-Christian background, which is somewhat opposed to Plato's otherworldly idealism, since both Judaism & Christianity are all about hard & incontrovertible historical actuality (no matter how spun & mythologized) - about chosenness, redemption, Messianism, and Incarnation... about the History of This World, its fabric - the Greek "appearances" (which Aristotle wished to "save")... (ie., "Before Abraham was, I Am." That's a very soulful comment. It means, to me, that something in us exists before time & history.)
Anyway, I was very vaguely pondering all this stuff, in the context of some personal issues & themes & imagery in my poem - the question of time & memory & loss & recovery, of the things we love & don't love enough... wondering about the idea that "grace" or forgiveness allows one to re-enter the texture of one's own past, & love it & understand it in a new way... "Proustian" in a sense, I guess, or Nabokovian...
So, I was vaguely chewing over these things, walking along a side street on the East Side... when suddenly I noticed, down on the sidewalk... a wristwatch. In fact, it looked like a brand new wristwatch. In fact, it was the same inexpensive Timex "woodsman" wristwatch (sort of an outdoorsy, Boy Scoutish watch) which I had owned all through the 80s & 90s, & then lost or broken or worn out somehow, & replaced with a watch I have never really liked that much. I hesitated... but no one was around, no one seemed to be looking for it. "Finder's keepers," as we used to say back in Hopkins. Right there on the sidewalk, I took off my old watch and put on the new one.
It was a sort of epiphany, this afternoon - which belonged with the poem. I found my old Timex.
Anyway, I was very vaguely pondering all this stuff, in the context of some personal issues & themes & imagery in my poem - the question of time & memory & loss & recovery, of the things we love & don't love enough... wondering about the idea that "grace" or forgiveness allows one to re-enter the texture of one's own past, & love it & understand it in a new way... "Proustian" in a sense, I guess, or Nabokovian...
So, I was vaguely chewing over these things, walking along a side street on the East Side... when suddenly I noticed, down on the sidewalk... a wristwatch. In fact, it looked like a brand new wristwatch. In fact, it was the same inexpensive Timex "woodsman" wristwatch (sort of an outdoorsy, Boy Scoutish watch) which I had owned all through the 80s & 90s, & then lost or broken or worn out somehow, & replaced with a watch I have never really liked that much. I hesitated... but no one was around, no one seemed to be looking for it. "Finder's keepers," as we used to say back in Hopkins. Right there on the sidewalk, I took off my old watch and put on the new one.
It was a sort of epiphany, this afternoon - which belonged with the poem. I found my old Timex.
Lanthanum 7.16
16
Gray Seekonk ice is gone. Your river’s royal
blue today, Blackstone (kingfisher blue, maybe)
& trimmed with white ‒ a roving, silvery
sheen. Where you crossed over with your pal
Roger ‒ flinty Pericles of curious lone-
rosy city-state. You more quiet, private ‒
no less stubborn... the one who went
to live with Indians. The record’s scant, sown
on fearsome wind (your library, notebooks);
you’re somewhat anonymous, like a historical
Jesus (who avoided interviews) ‒ typical
Everyman, like her, me... & this the crux
I would sing, this quiddity : in chaste eye
of Aristotle, Blackstone, Joyce ‒
a sea of ex cathedra cymbal tones
that ripple from the stem of every ordinary
Dublin bloom. The deep & potent human faculty
of soul, whose pregnant salience is the spring
of springs ‒ its clear Itasca hoisting up
Big Muddy time : for every pain & difficulty
here is the matrix of a healing symphony.
It is a qualitative change, a change of heart
that comes on incognito... unremarked & quiet
as a dove’s low anthem, cooing from a factory
of forlorn bricks, out of a central fall (Babel
to Babylon). That building salience of song,
lifting ‒ as when a grim lambda, unstrung
on the retina, turns over... into smile
(El-trove, Red Rover, veltro). You know your eye
has something of a Finnish curve (like Saarinen,
or Tuonela)? Like a Hopkins lake ‒ deserted oasis
where Franks met Steins (for wedding, by & by).
2.20.11
2.19.2011
Lanthanum 7.15
15
February afternoon. The sun through a mosaic
of little blue-gray cube-clouds, like a glowing
Inca wall. Henry collects his 50 states of wing-
nut flux... (77 J-sessions, for sake of one LP).
& the stream flows on, ungraspable (almost).
Time’s newspaper, after the paper boy has grown
& flown. All those anonymous hollows, sown
in red-veined wilderness (blown wilder, ghostlier
day by day) ‒ your own heartfelt Nowhereville,
O most AWOL Unknown Soldier. Dispossessed
of every predicate, as Aristotle sketched it ‒
eraser-point of description, inimitable windowsill
of bifocal-vision : what you know, of what
you have been, of what you have made, of who
you are. And as you are, you are : owl’s hoot
or nom de plume - a chapter in the ziggurat
& its demise (brick-breathing fiery Book
of J). What magnet trains this iron heart
toward its own sunburst? What alchemist
transmutes hungry desire to one sweet look ‒
one infant-newborn love’s Thanksgiving Day?
It’s just arisen... just a rose in your eye,
Sharon. Soul-salience, diamond mandala,
Almond Joy... one upright L at apex of a
wayward Noah’s arc (orthogonal, just) ‒
anachronic lanthan-cornice of Maximus-
Blackstone’s pursuit of personhood. Most-
sunny disposition. Ancient of Days... akme.
2.19.11
2.16.2011
Lanthanum 7.14
14
This gray bird gravely mourning in the rock
shall not be moved. Rock-dove, rainbow-
neck... my pigeon-heart, filled with low
eaves, low-embered evenings. Aftershock
of earthy worlds. Those wheedling ravens
homing on their jasper nests (of sunken
anchors, knives, old nets) along forgotten
rivers ‒ droning (bass & catfish havens)
through steep hobo calendars (like iron).
Pretty soon Hen will do his spastic number :
1,3,2... (half-limping over that star-flower,
child). Mimic of a cold-cocked spring (one
Russian January’s janissary). & it is not
ashes’ temple he intones (the buried man’s
dry wooden corner). For the heart demands
answers (while the dove coos not today, not,
not today). Maybe tomorrow. (Promise.)
Answers it already knows, almond ‒ heartfully.
Hopefully (intuitive). The poem’s true play-
pen (play dough, play, Penny... play rusty-
green copper). Nailed to the mast
of a cedar-tree, in old Romania (or
beech). Where the fresco-church, for
centuries (of rain & wind) might last, &
last, yet. Where a wall of summer branches
flakes leaves that filter your philosophy,
Horatio... & rise through solid snow, Henry
‒ through river ice (Espiritu Santo, she sez).
2.16.11
2.15.2011
Lanthanum 7.13
13
Birdy sings, Birdy, at the center of the earth
(shy, low, shy, low). Birdy of no form, no
comeliness. Pigeon (pi-Jean, pi-Jean), you
silly castaway, stray street-person, worth
less & less. A pig’s dungeon, maybe (Villon-
pissoir). Filled up with contempt, with
impotence, with rage. With rags (blithe,
Gadarene) of possessions. Old news (mon-
otonous, processional). Your soul (pearl
in disguise, disgusted). Ghost. Like mist
of melting snow in the pine barrens (south-
west Jersey, just past the freeway). Swirl,
pitch-black raven-Hellene (Isosceles) on
your silver tripod O... O Gorgon-trestled
railroad-Pythia... micro-knife, who wrestles
pins from hobo-tribes... my seedy-cedar sigh
of Lebanon (Romania). Birdy calls us
(on the jasper perpendicular ‒ the hand
out of the depths of the sea, circumfer-
and on fire) to the old union, my Valentinus;
Love’s rainy monarch’s milkweed wasteland
leads lightly to Cedar Mountain, somewhere
deep in Mexico. On an angle lifted in the air.
On an arbor-breeze... (old amber ampersand).
This human thread, purple... immeasurably
subtle (weft of butterfly across Armenia).
Aimless, free. My soul, my soul (Jessie
Ophelia, Jenny). Rainbow in clerestory.
2.13.2011
for Valentine's Eve
This is a section from the long poem Forth of July. Tom Fleming was a childhood friend, passed away around 1990.
12
i.m. Tom Fleming
You would have been glad to be here today
Fleming to read the Sunday funnies
Aaugh! As Lucy lifts the 12-millionth football
and Charlie Brown flips for the 13th time Bonk!
A little sad too the way the everlasting ends
this evening light limping so slowly only lent
limpid toward the vague rim of tonight’s Milky
Way Sparky’s wavery quickness trembling
only lent now Good grief! While it’s raining the
Doctor is [IN] and you are uncommonly
weird like a Red Baron’s flying mach-lemon
in the mind of a pup and the rain it raineth
every day like frogs pummeling our foolish blind
shopping carts ah for I am sick of love he
cried running down the street in Lisbon
that twines with a tiny pulse a nub
like the distant crown of Shakespeare’s head
a curvature this pause or sigh this dome
between waves or salient mud-caked
seed so small set adrift (centuries
surrounded with fire your burning bones, Tom
a greenish Copernican flame in the marrow
planted amid the avarice of the pilots the raw
and envious violence of Ahab a mote
that will grow limpid) you know there are women
limping with this cenacle (like myrrh afloat
upon tears) (chambered in the upper tiers)
(up the stairs) helical of their wombs
unknown to us but only a promise
when the last full measure is poured out
beside the shores of great rivers the trumpet
sounds into the depths of that prairie siempre
2.13.2000
2.11.2011
Lanthanum 7.12
This section was written as a sort of riposte to an earlier section, written on the 4th of July a couple years ago. I'm thinking here about my grandparents, Edward S. (the WW I vet) and Florence Gould (born on the 4th in 1900). It's also a counterweight of riposte to this earlier section (Lanthanum 3.12), written on the 4th of July.
12
A symbol is less than nothing, less than empty
word, husk of oblivion. Unless blooded with
life’s valve, heart’s pulse. Watered with
tears, that Liberty Tree. With the Thirty-
Third Division he was in the St. Mihiel drive...
for gallantry in action... Meuse-Argonne...
decorated... Silver Star. Verdun Medallion.
His Book of Common Prayer, peppered, hived
with shrapnel. Florence, at home, barely
grown yet. Father swept off in the flu
rampage. Starts going to church then (blue,
yearning). Born on the 4th of July (1900).
The sabbath day, the sabbath day
rooftops the world with its gray
cloudy clerestory; & my old tree
(shrub mountain laurel) blazes 33 ‒
99 strings of alpine bells (their echo-
avalanche). Thus I follow the yoke of
your wool-shrouded shoulders (odd murk-
moody bulwark). To that pin-oak (riveted,
revolving axle) where my seven weak
candles join the fifty stars. Galaxy
of mortal gravity & winking lights, cast
up ahead... Amalgam-sign (meekness,
fortitude). For the grain of the song stems
through suspension-spaces in a hollow nave ‒
as snowbound Berryman jumps from his grave
or branches nest above brave woodchip throng.
2.9.11
12
A symbol is less than nothing, less than empty
word, husk of oblivion. Unless blooded with
life’s valve, heart’s pulse. Watered with
tears, that Liberty Tree. With the Thirty-
Third Division he was in the St. Mihiel drive...
for gallantry in action... Meuse-Argonne...
decorated... Silver Star. Verdun Medallion.
His Book of Common Prayer, peppered, hived
with shrapnel. Florence, at home, barely
grown yet. Father swept off in the flu
rampage. Starts going to church then (blue,
yearning). Born on the 4th of July (1900).
The sabbath day, the sabbath day
rooftops the world with its gray
cloudy clerestory; & my old tree
(shrub mountain laurel) blazes 33 ‒
99 strings of alpine bells (their echo-
avalanche). Thus I follow the yoke of
your wool-shrouded shoulders (odd murk-
moody bulwark). To that pin-oak (riveted,
revolving axle) where my seven weak
candles join the fifty stars. Galaxy
of mortal gravity & winking lights, cast
up ahead... Amalgam-sign (meekness,
fortitude). For the grain of the song stems
through suspension-spaces in a hollow nave ‒
as snowbound Berryman jumps from his grave
or branches nest above brave woodchip throng.
2.9.11
lanthanum 7.11 (with subtitles)
Experimenting with including the text with the video... have a few kinks to work out, but here goes...
2.10.2011
Life as a left-handed Bluejay
About 16 years ago, around 1996, I started writing short interlinked poems, in a simple rhymed ABBA quatrain form. I was modelling them on some poems & sequences of poems I admired, by Osip Mandelstam. Written toward the end of his life while living in exile in Voronezh, a Russian provincial river-town, the poems were collected posthumously in the Voronezh Book or Voronezh Notebooks. I liked many things about these poems, including their very lyrical pathos and their sketchy, "outdoors", plein air quality - & also the way individual poems echoed & responded to each other in short sequences.
About the time I was just getting started with this, I remember sitting out in the backyard & hearing, for the first time, a bluejay really improvising - like a kind of strange scat-singing. Somehow this experience got infused quite deeply into what I was trying to do in poetry : the sketchy improvisatory element, but also the persistent desire to synthesize things, in longer complex works... the result, after a couple years, was a book-length poem, Stubborn Grew - which, just as soon as I finished it, triggered two even longer book-length sequels (The Grassblade Light & July). Finally, around 2000, I finished it, & called the whole thing Forth of July. (All these books, & others, are available here.)
That was over a decade ago. Since then, I've never really gotten out of the groove of that simple ABBA form. I've made a few forays in other directions, but never for long. I've written at least 2 more long sequences - "India Point" (in the book Dove Street), and Rest Note. Repeatedly, upon finishing one of these long poems, I take a deep breath & say to myself : "OK, that's it. Time for something completely different." Yet here I am, writing (for a couple years now) yet another poem in this vein (Lanthanum).
It's gotten to feel a lot like sculpture - or better, woodcarving. I'm very, very comfortable with it. But that doesn't mean it's easy for me. It's as though a special idiom, or language, or way-of-speaking, or mask (persona) has fused & intertwined itself with a particular form (these quatrains, in a repetitive-numerical design). & I feel most free & intellectually alive when I'm in the midst of composing these poems, working out the words & imagery & meanings I want to hint at or convey - elaborating, again & again, on old, cherished, half-expressed themes. When I'm not actively focused & composing the poems, well... lets' say the process makes me happy. So, this see-saw between writing & not-writing tends to make me feel perpetually a little on edge, off-balance... I'm in a co-dependency relationship with a left-handed woodcarving Muse. Something like that.
So I'm writing these long, seemingly-endless, repetitive series of poems, continuous variations on a simple form & a few themes. My approach does not have much in common with the short, direct-hit manner of much contemporary verse. & then another thing I was attracted to (& tried to emulate) in Mandelstam, as well as Hart Crane : a kind of indirection, an elusiveness. Maybe something like Edgar Poe's idea of the "vague." The truth is, I am slightly bored with clear, transparent speech in poetry - no matter how elegant, intelligent, profound or clever it manages to be. The meaning comes at you like a kind of aggression. I'm more passive-aggressive, I guess : I'm drawn to infinitely-absorptive poems - riddles, mysteries, puzzles, indirections. I admire musical imagery that signals a feeling before you understand it (if you ever understand it). I've steeped myself in this kind of indirection : it's a huge part of the persona or idiom I've projected. Readers might be tempted to misinterpret this as an expression of religiosity, mysticism, occult tendencies, etc. - but this would be a mistake. I like this kind of "secret" speech purely for it's game-like, puzzling, aesthetic qualities. I like the tune of something just on the edge of reason - like wind blowing through tall grass.
So I'm writing these endless, repetitive and obscure series of poems... again, not the most popular modus operandi these days. And I've grown tired of trying to win acceptance through the regular channels of the literature industry. I suppose people look at me & for many reasons think "crazy, eccentric." But put yourself, if you can, in my place. I'll be 59 years old this spring. I was writing poetry before most of the senior editors of our American literary magazines were born. After a while, you get a little discouraged - you simply grow tired of the rejection. I think I'm not taken seriously; I'm marginalized. Well, what can you do? I know something about copy editing, about DIY publishing. I've learned about YouTube (which I disliked at first). Now I've adapted my writing process to "instant accessibility." I write a section of my current, seemingly-endless work in progress : as soon as I finish editing it & shaping it up, I recite it on YouTube & publish the poem on my blog. No editors, no sifting, no middle-people, no problem. It's poetry as it happens, available immediately. Of course, I still don't get no respect - but that's not the main thing. The main thing is taking dictation from the woodcarving Muse (if she's still around today, like she was yesterday).
I don't go anywhere, I don't see anyone. I have a day job at which I must show up, bills, and family obligations. I'm a bookworm & a writer. I can't - & don't wish to - gallivant around on the lit-biz party circuit. I'll be 60 pretty soon. I'd rather try to concentrate, remember, meditate, contemplate, compose, write. As long as I'm still standing. I like woodcarving (it's a laurel tree).
About the time I was just getting started with this, I remember sitting out in the backyard & hearing, for the first time, a bluejay really improvising - like a kind of strange scat-singing. Somehow this experience got infused quite deeply into what I was trying to do in poetry : the sketchy improvisatory element, but also the persistent desire to synthesize things, in longer complex works... the result, after a couple years, was a book-length poem, Stubborn Grew - which, just as soon as I finished it, triggered two even longer book-length sequels (The Grassblade Light & July). Finally, around 2000, I finished it, & called the whole thing Forth of July. (All these books, & others, are available here.)
That was over a decade ago. Since then, I've never really gotten out of the groove of that simple ABBA form. I've made a few forays in other directions, but never for long. I've written at least 2 more long sequences - "India Point" (in the book Dove Street), and Rest Note. Repeatedly, upon finishing one of these long poems, I take a deep breath & say to myself : "OK, that's it. Time for something completely different." Yet here I am, writing (for a couple years now) yet another poem in this vein (Lanthanum).
It's gotten to feel a lot like sculpture - or better, woodcarving. I'm very, very comfortable with it. But that doesn't mean it's easy for me. It's as though a special idiom, or language, or way-of-speaking, or mask (persona) has fused & intertwined itself with a particular form (these quatrains, in a repetitive-numerical design). & I feel most free & intellectually alive when I'm in the midst of composing these poems, working out the words & imagery & meanings I want to hint at or convey - elaborating, again & again, on old, cherished, half-expressed themes. When I'm not actively focused & composing the poems, well... lets' say the process makes me happy. So, this see-saw between writing & not-writing tends to make me feel perpetually a little on edge, off-balance... I'm in a co-dependency relationship with a left-handed woodcarving Muse. Something like that.
So I'm writing these long, seemingly-endless, repetitive series of poems, continuous variations on a simple form & a few themes. My approach does not have much in common with the short, direct-hit manner of much contemporary verse. & then another thing I was attracted to (& tried to emulate) in Mandelstam, as well as Hart Crane : a kind of indirection, an elusiveness. Maybe something like Edgar Poe's idea of the "vague." The truth is, I am slightly bored with clear, transparent speech in poetry - no matter how elegant, intelligent, profound or clever it manages to be. The meaning comes at you like a kind of aggression. I'm more passive-aggressive, I guess : I'm drawn to infinitely-absorptive poems - riddles, mysteries, puzzles, indirections. I admire musical imagery that signals a feeling before you understand it (if you ever understand it). I've steeped myself in this kind of indirection : it's a huge part of the persona or idiom I've projected. Readers might be tempted to misinterpret this as an expression of religiosity, mysticism, occult tendencies, etc. - but this would be a mistake. I like this kind of "secret" speech purely for it's game-like, puzzling, aesthetic qualities. I like the tune of something just on the edge of reason - like wind blowing through tall grass.
So I'm writing these endless, repetitive and obscure series of poems... again, not the most popular modus operandi these days. And I've grown tired of trying to win acceptance through the regular channels of the literature industry. I suppose people look at me & for many reasons think "crazy, eccentric." But put yourself, if you can, in my place. I'll be 59 years old this spring. I was writing poetry before most of the senior editors of our American literary magazines were born. After a while, you get a little discouraged - you simply grow tired of the rejection. I think I'm not taken seriously; I'm marginalized. Well, what can you do? I know something about copy editing, about DIY publishing. I've learned about YouTube (which I disliked at first). Now I've adapted my writing process to "instant accessibility." I write a section of my current, seemingly-endless work in progress : as soon as I finish editing it & shaping it up, I recite it on YouTube & publish the poem on my blog. No editors, no sifting, no middle-people, no problem. It's poetry as it happens, available immediately. Of course, I still don't get no respect - but that's not the main thing. The main thing is taking dictation from the woodcarving Muse (if she's still around today, like she was yesterday).
I don't go anywhere, I don't see anyone. I have a day job at which I must show up, bills, and family obligations. I'm a bookworm & a writer. I can't - & don't wish to - gallivant around on the lit-biz party circuit. I'll be 60 pretty soon. I'd rather try to concentrate, remember, meditate, contemplate, compose, write. As long as I'm still standing. I like woodcarving (it's a laurel tree).
2.08.2011
Lanthanum 7.11
11
Poverello Apollo patches together some laurel twigs
or blackberry (always was a berry man) for a
memoir of his lost tree-limb ‒ O nevermore,
he raves (orphan Orpheus). Swigs
liberally from wooden cup of ruddy, runny
mead. Gathers motley woodchips for his
crazy-tilt word-house - a potent gray ace
in circuitous moor-dance (double solitaire).
Only turn the leaf over. The new leaf
(elliptical enantiomorph). The lens
of deep green ‒ scored to bronze &
Ionian bark (Karelian canoe). On a reef
in Petersburg. & like the lightness of rumors
through lofty aeries, elevations ‒ hopeful
murmurs, birch-kindling ‒ he finds a river-trove
in mute soil, blown loess, looming stillness (hers).
He’s merged with her murmur-shadow (Imogen,
imago). Like Charlie’s wagon with its axle, or
the bear with its growl... like St. George &
his rude crusade ‒ his rusty crow, his Injun
shade... his evening bough, its lengthening.
Like that pin-oak where the king was flown
with autumn leaves. Her grace, to be gone
until he understood : the dream-songe, ringing
out of time. That gray ace, hovering
like jasper crown over the bleeding heart...
& the lamp-lance... baobab, almond, cart-
wheeling Jesse-tree. Past 51 P (sky-written).
2.8.11
2.06.2011
lanthanum 7.10
10
Hidden on the inner lining of an eyelid ‒ whose?
This hologram or macro-hole. Dangle-matrix
for raisin-fall of many a fair grape ‒ tricksy
mirror ever which way, like an eyebrow’s
bruised black eye, radiant with shooting stars
of ouch (agony galaxy). Still, bend of dream.
High vault that only you can reach, Centime ‒
penned in thy nonpareil & francophone corner
of desert, jungle ‒ whoever you are (burdened
birdy). Go down, Moses ‒ de day’s yo own.
Like me, sort of ‒ you. Get it? One
agate ray sees W.H. (in Willie’s hyper-learnèd
wail). What gray ace, Falcon ‒ after a great
long watch ‒ is yours to play? What raven
now dare caw thy rage? I’ll wager y’hat, men ‒
fished from mummers’ Troyes-town ‒ been ate
already. No? Nein? Could be, then (ten
to one it ain’t). & yet we’ll go for broke
around this yearning wheel again ‒ each spoke
a buried radius ‒ straight to your heart, Gawain.
Because the arc of this pinwheel tryworks is
grounded in you. This is the sanction
for each river-vagary, Hobo, each Western
Celtic bowerbird’s aromatic isola di rifiuti;
for as the spring leaps from the rock, &
wind shares its news, rocking the willow-limbs,
so the sleepy player-king slips from each grim
forecast ‒ pencil-thin, belovèd (able ampersand).
2.6.11
2.05.2011
lanthanum 7.9 : for the people of Egypt
9
to the people of Egypt
If you were here now, Grace, I know you’d be there ‒
from your Pink Gate in Morocco, en voyage
today, to this Cairo kairos ‒ embattled assemblage
filled with fortitude ‒ in Tahrir (Liberation!) Square.
Grace indeed encircles this square : plain men
& women, standing up at last to their full height,
facing down the hireling bullies (Pharaoh’s night-
owls, rabid birds of prey) to speak again
their ancient birthright : liberty. One word
found often on Williams’ tongue, and Clarke’s,
the cityfounders, here in their young upstarts’
res publica ‒ along with another one (heard
not so much these days) : civility. Providence
divine ‒ the providence of God, they held ‒
had granted humankind the capability (swelled
from primordial springtime root) to sense
the right, the true, the just ‒ the common sense;
& so, in wisdom, kindliness & fellow-feeling
to love thy neighbor as thyself (deep keel
of every commonweal). Heartfelt experience
shows in its works, proven by trial : to stand
with the people, singing, we shall not be moved.
Upright, on the square ‒ a human treasure-trove,
a sea of civic light. Triangulate my headband
of purple, Grace, beside you, there ‒ from here
in Providence, off Morris Ave. (near its honey-
comb sphere, Temple Emanu-El). I’ll wheel my
mummer’s dance your way, fluting... What Cheer?...
2.03.2011
lanthanum 7.8
8
Sings in the dark, where no one hears,
the deaf-blind fiddler, his secret way ‒
there in Bukovina, by that Tree of Jesse
flaking from old wooden logs (like tears,
in paint). Nobody’s song, & everyone’s ‒
the one without numbers, the ignorant
one (lone sum). Like stubborn plant
dead-centered on its half-wit revelations,
crippled vagaries of revery. Only,
possibly, co-revery (careening toward
recovery). If you’re there, that
is, windy beard-blown bard ‒ Henry’s
sown rye, oats, lea (unsprung) flung hard
a-lee (O wild, O light, O heavyweight JB).
J, be. Be tree. B Mine. Be three
in one, & all for thee, dark tan one (shard
of shepherd’s bole). Bucolic pin-oak, or
the king’s own regal-eagle hiding-place ‒ your
terrible, ferrous, bulbous salience (a meteor-
hole). Follow him down there, into the shelter
of nonentity (old rivery Hobo, medieval tater) ‒
into the core of primordial gravity (everywhere,
for Everyman). Earth-mouth. That feral O
you cannot know (where you must go)... waiter,
janitor, servant, slave... Melchizedek, dark
Sheba-spouse... dead weight in the tomb or
stubborn womb (of tomorrow’s bride’s bride-
groom). Bloom, wayward almond; homeward,
spark.
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